Promises

by Kacey Ezell

Chapter One

  Two Months Earlier

  “You sure about this, ma’am?”

  Mara didn’t turn her head to look in Elroy’s direction as he spoke. Instead, she continued standing with her arms crossed over her chest, watching as the SpinDog shuttle made its final approach to the center of their brand spanking-new training camp. She did, however, unbend enough to tilt her head a tiny bit toward him, so he could hear her over the sound of the shuttle’s engines. “El, have you been sure of anything since we woke up?”

  Elroy snorted behind her, acknowledging her point.

  “Exactly,” she said. “But Murphy’s sure about one thing—and he’s right. We can’t go at this alone. And so far, the SpinDogs seem to be our best option for allies. If that means teaching them to fly helicopters, then I’m gonna teach them to fly helicopters. They can’t be any worse than some of the FID students I’ve dealt with.”

  “FID?” Elroy asked.

  “Foreign Internal Defense. Um…I think you guys called them MAAG in Vietnam.”

  “Oh, yeah. Those guys. You did that crazy shit?”

  “Little bit,” Mara said, noncommittal out of habit. “A few years ago. It’s why I know how to fly the N-model Huey.”

  “Nice. I always knew you were a bad mamma jamma, ma’am,” Elroy said, and it was Mara’s turn to let out a short laugh.

  “Always, El?” she asked. They’d known each other less than a week.

  “Always since I saw you fly.”

  “That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, El,” Mara said. “Now let’s smile pretty for our guests.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mara schooled her face into the half-pleasant, half-intimidating expression she’d perfected for meeting new students. She knew that Elroy stood a half-step behind her, in a near-identical pose, with his own menacing scowl firmly in place. Six-foot-five inches and 290 pounds of ebony-skinned muscle, Sergeant Elroy Frazier towered over her, but his placement and posture said clearly that he was on her side and subordinate to her in rank.

  Little subtleties like that mattered in Mara’s experience. Especially during a first impression.

  After angling under the camo-netting that mimicked the vegetative cover common at R’Bak’s poles, the SpinDog craft set down with enviable lightness and cut its engines. As the noise abated, a hatch opened in the side and a single figure emerged and walked toward them. As soon as she could discern details, Mara found herself blinking in surprise.

  “Is that one of our guys?” she asked, voice pitched low. “He looks too big to be a SpinDog!”

  “He ain’t that big,” Elroy said, and Mara had to fight a smile.

  Maybe he didn’t match up to Elroy’s gargantuan frame, but the man walking up to them was quite a bit larger than any of the other space-dwelling men Mara had yet encountered. He had to top six feet, easy, and he was far too powerfully built to have grown up in the .75-gee of their long, rolling asteroid habitats. But he wasn’t one of theirs—wasn’t a Lost Soldier—and he wore the utilitarian coveralls sported by SpinDog shuttle pilots.

  He strode confidently up to Mara and Elroy and came to a rigid position of attention about a meter in front of them. Then he brought his right hand up in the salute that both of the ex-US service members recognized and waited.

  “Sir, Pilot Ozendi reports as ordered.”

  He spoke the English words with a harsh, clipped accent. Softened from the sound of the old Ktoran Mara had learned in the Dornaani’s virtual language sims, but its origins were clear. More importantly, she understood the salute for what it was. She snapped to her own position of attention and returned it.

  “Please, stand at ease,” she said in bastardized Ktoran. Ozendi dropped his hand, and his face split in a wide grin that flashed white against his bronze complexion.

  “I learned English from one of your soldiers named Vat,” he said, speaking in his own language. “But your, er, ‘classic’ Ktoran is very good.”

  “Thank you,” Mara said. “I know Vat; he’s a friend of mine. We’ve been waiting for you. Are you alone?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I will learn your machine and then I will teach others. It was decided.”

  “That’s not what we were briefed,” Mara said. “We were expecting a full class.”

  “The class will come after I learn.”

  “I see,” Mara said. She drew in a deep breath and took a moment to study the man in front of her. With his size, the color of his skin, and his wide, easy grin, something about him tugged at her memory. Her ex’s bronzed, beautiful male face coalesced in her mind’s eye, laughing at something she said as he shook seawater out of his eyes. Unexpected pain flared bright and hot in her gut.

  “I don’t suppose you surf, do you?” she asked, without really meaning to do so.

  “I do not know what that is.”

  “Never mind.” She shook her head slightly to clear it. “It’s nice to meet you, Ozendi. I’m Captain Mara Lee. This is my crew chief, Sergeant Frazier. And this,” she said, turning slightly, “is the mighty Bell UH-1 Iroquois. You can call her ‘Huey.’”

  Ozendi tilted his head to the side and looked from Mara to the helicopter and back again. “Why do you use the word ‘her’? It is a machine, is it not?”

  Mara smiled thinly. “Yes,” she said. “She is a machine. But ask any Huey pilot, and they’ll tell you that she has a soul. You’ll learn, and until you do, I’d appreciate it if you’d use the proper terms out of respect. This old warrior, and others like her, have saved a lot of lives over the years.”

  “Including mine,” Elroy rumbled behind her.

  Ozendi’s eyebrows pinched together in a frown. “But this is not proper. A machine does not have intelligence or a personality. You cannot speak of it as if it does.”

  Mara’s smile grew. “Tell you what, hotshot,” she said, “when you’re teaching me how to fly your aircraft, you can call it whatever you like. But if you want to fly my bird, you’ll do as I say. Sergeant Frazier will get you settled into your quarters and issue you the gear you need. Be back here in an hour to start academics.”

  She didn’t wait for a reply, simply turned on her heel and walked back toward the low-slung building that functioned as the headquarters of this tiny operation. She had to call Murphy and inform him that the SpinDogs had changed the plan. And she needed a moment to collect herself and get her shit together.

  Why did the damn student have to look so much like her ex-husband?

  * * *

  After about a week of academics, Mara realized that Ozendi didn’t look all that much like Cam after all, other than the fact that they were both built like Polynesian warrior gods. Cam had always been light-hearted and easygoing, which had balanced nicely with Mara’s driven intensity in the early years of their marriage. Ozendi, on the other hand, was every bit as focused as she, and had a healthy dose of the competitive nature she’d glimpsed among their SpinDog allies. Especially when dealing with Elroy, which Mara found to be equal parts amusing and annoying. But it was a personality quirk, and like all personality quirks, it presented an opportunity for exploitation if she paid attention.

  And Mara had learned to always pay attention. Which was why she and Ozendi were walking out to the bird alone today, despite Elroy’s vociferous protestations.

  “Ma’am,” he’d said, using his hardest-edged tone. “Major Murphy charged me with your safety. You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m absolutely serious, El,” she’d replied, slamming her locker closed for emphasis. She leaned down to stuff her helmet in its bag and straightened back up, her eyes hard. “You’re not going. End of story.”

  “But how can I—”

  “Keep me safe? That’s a damn good question. Do you have a set of controls in the back, Sergeant Frazier?” she’d asked, raising her eyebrows, and letting her tone dip down into the glacial range.

  “No, but—”

  “But what? What the fuck do you think you’re g
oing to do back there, then, hm? Learning to hover is arguably the most dangerous thing the student pilot will do. Putting you on the bird exposes you to unnecessary risk without any corresponding reward. Whereas I, as a competent and trained instructor pilot seated at a set of controls, have the ability to prevent the student from crashing the aircraft and injuring or killing us both. However, that job will be infinitely easier if he’s not also trying to show off for you because of whatever stupid man-competition thing you guys have going on between you. So you, Sergeant, will sit your ass down and wait for me to land. Is that clear?”

  Mara had watched as a muscle in El’s cheek jumped in his otherwise impassive face. But he’d nodded and left without giving her any more grief. She’d have to smooth his ruffled feathers later, she knew. Right now, though, she had other things on her mind.

  “So,” she said as she and her student approached the nose of the helicopter, “are you ready for this?”

  “Absolutely,” Ozendi replied, flashing her that confident grin of his. “I look forward to it.”

  “Remember what I told you,” she said. “Soft hands, soft feet.”

  “Of course, of course,” he nodded, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t really paying attention. So, she just shrugged and walked around to the left side of the aircraft, opened the door, and plunked her helmet on the seat.

  She got her seat set up the way she liked, activated her EFB, scrolled down to the proper checklist page, and then walked back around the bird to join Ozendi. Though she’d been skeptical at first, she had to admit that the concept of having all of her publications on a computer no larger than a pad of paper was a damn nice improvement over the paper checklists and pubs she’d always lugged around before, even if it did make her feel a little bit like a character on Star Trek.

  “Right,” she said. “Let’s preflight her.”

  Ozendi glanced at Mara’s hands where she held her EFB. His face went blank, losing all of the cheerful excitement of the moment before.

  “Why do you bring that?” he asked, pointing. “The tablet computer?”

  “It’s my EFB,” she said, startled. He just looked at her, waiting. “Electronic Flight Bag. It’s got my checklists and stuff on it. You’ve seen me use this before. I had it during academics.”

  “It is merely archival?”

  “Y-yes,” she said, eyes narrowing. Where was he going with this line of questioning? “But you should know that. Sergeant Frazier gave you one on the first day, when he issued you your helmet!”

  “I did not activate it,” Ozendi said.

  Mara blinked. “Wait—what? You didn’t even turn it on?”

  “No. I do not trust it.”

  “But…you went through a whole week of academics! You had to have opened it to study. How else could you possibly have learned your systems knowledge well enough to pass the test?”

  “You and Sergeant Frazier taught me. I remembered.”

  Mara blinked again, her mind reeling. “You mean to tell me that you memorized everything we said to you in academics?”

  “Yes. So I do not need a computer to tell me what to do.”

  “The EFB doesn’t—” Mara shook her head in frustration and abruptly remembered part of Murphy’s initial briefing about this mission. The SpinDogs, he’d said, were incredibly leery of automation or AI-assistance. Obsessively so. For that reason, all radio-navigation mods had been removed from the aircraft. Hell, even their comms had been stripped down to very basic, line of sight radios.

  “Okay, look,” she said, taking a deep breath. She angled the tablet to let Ozendi see the Before Exterior Inspection Checklist on its screen. “This is just archival, like you said. It’s not an augmentation or assist of any kind. It’s literally just a book displayed on the screen. But this book is important, Ozendi. You can’t fly without it, even if you memorize every word I ever say. There’s stuff in here that I’ve never encountered, thank everything that’s good. But if I ever did encounter it, my best shot at dealing with it is contained here.”

  Ozendi nodded slowly, but instead of relief or acquiescence, his face assumed a pained look.

  “Cannot we just take the book?”

  “You mean a physical copy? I don’t—we don’t have one printed out, and to print it will take…hell, I don’t know…several days? But…” she pressed her lips together and made a decision. Murphy may not like it, but he’d been the one to talk about strategic victories when dealing with their new allies, after all.

  “Look,” she said. “It’s important to me that we don’t do anything you’re uncomfortable with. If you don’t want to fly with my EFB, that’s fine. We can postpone the flight until we can get you some physical copies of the publications you need. And I will get you those. But if you want to go today, maybe you can just trust me that the EFB is just an archival device, like you said?”

  Ozendi stared at her, his eyes dark with conflicting emotions. She could tell he wanted to go. He was a pilot, after all. At a certain point, the yearning to fly saturates the self and makes every delay painful.

  She smiled and reached out with her free hand to pat his shoulder. “It is up to you, my friend,” she said, using that language for the first time in their acquaintance. He started a little at her touch. “I will not push. I want nothing but trust between us if we’re going to fly together.”

  “I trust you,” he said, looking as if he spoke without realizing it. “I want to go.”

  “All right,” she said. “Then let’s go! And I promise, on my honor, I’ll get your paper pubs started as soon as we land.”

  His smile grew slowly this time, rather than the flashing, cocky grin she’d seen before. This one seemed like something else, something much more genuine.

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course. Now, let’s start up top…”

  * * *

  “Okay, so the first thing we’re going to do,” Mara said over the Huey’s intercom as she smoothly hover-taxied the bird out into a clear field behind the shuttle landing area, “is try out the controls one by one.”

  “I can take them both,” Ozendi said, keying his intercom microphone with his foot after a minute’s searching for the switch.

  “Well, first of all, there are three sets of controls, not two,” Mara said as she decreased collective and set them down lightly in the center of the field. “So that’s something you need to understand right away. Hovering a helicopter isn’t like flying a fixed-wing aircraft. You’re keeping the bird in a state of dynamic stability. Here, I’ll show you.”

  She looked over at Ozendi, occupying the seat to her right. He sat up tall, his spine straight, his legs rigid with tension, his feet flat on the heel plates in front of him.

  “Look at me,” she said. “Turn your head and look. First of all, notice my posture. See how I’m kinda slumped down like this?” She exaggerated the curve of her spine for effect. “Slide your butt forward just a bit on the seat and let yourself bend. She’s not the most ergonomically designed aircraft ever, but she gets the job done.”

  “Like this?” he asked, echoing her posture. Mara grinned and nodded.

  “Perfect,” she said. “Now, stretch your legs out a little and put the balls of your feet on the crossbars of the pedals—go ahead, you can look. Down there where it says ‘Bell’ and ‘Huey.’ And put your heels down on the heel plates. Yes. Good. Now when I tell you to make a pedal movement, I just want you to move your foot—not your whole leg! Just the foot, pivot at your ankle. And if I tell you to ‘curl your toes,’ I mean just that. Scrunch your toes up in your boot. Understand?”

  “Yes, but why—”

  “Because, Ozendi, the Huey is a lovely old warbird, but she must be treated like a lady. You have to make very small, very fine muscle movements in order to not overcontrol the aircraft and begin working at cross purposes to yourself. You’ll see what I mean here in a minute. Just trust me for now.”

  She glanced at his face, or what she could see of it beneath
his helmet’s smoked visor. His lips were twisted in a wry half smile, but he nodded. Good enough.

  “Okay, hands. Put your right hand on the cyclic. Again, look over at me. See how my right forearm is anchored on my thigh like this? That’s part of the reason for sitting the way we do. You keep your arm locked down like this, and that helps you to make very small, fine movements with your hands. And don’t grip the cyclic that tight! I can see your knuckles turning white from here. Hold it like it’s an egg, don’t strangle it—better. Now look at my hand again. See how I’m waving my bottom three fingers at you? I’m only holding the cyclic with my thumb and forefinger, so that I can key the trigger mic and talk. See? When I tell you to ‘wiggle your fingers,’ that’s what I want you to do, got it?”

  Ozendi obediently waggled the middle, ring, and pinky fingers of his right hand at her.

  “Perfect, again. Okay, lastly, the collective. This is your vertical movement, got it? You pull up, we go up. You push down, we go down. It’s very simple, but it often feels counterintuitive to people used to flying fixed-wing craft. So just remember, up and down are in your left hand. Lateral movement is in your right, and you control where your nose points with your feet.”

  “I learned these things in academics,” Ozendi said, a thread of impatience working through his tone.

  “Correction. You heard these things in academics. You’re about to learn them now. So just follow along on the controls as I pick us up…”

  Mara began to smoothly pull up on the collective as she spoke, feeding in a tiny amount of left pedal as she did so. In truth, she didn’t even think about the pedals or the collective anymore. The Huey was the first helicopter she’d ever flown, and, at this point, hovering was merely an extension of her thoughts: Mara thought “up” and her body and the machine worked together to pull them up into a stable hover, with her skids hanging exactly four feet above the ground.

  “Now what I want you to do,” she said, hearing the dreamlike quality in her voice that meant she was speaking while hovering, “is to slowly take control of the cyclic. Your hand is already in place. I just want you to keep us in a stable hover. When you’re ready: ‘Pilot has the cyclic.’”